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Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita ()

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Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita () Journal of American Studies, (), , – © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies . This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./S First published online November A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita () NATHAN ABRAMS This article presents a case study of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, considering how his films can be considered an emotional response to the Holocaust, the legacy of European anti- Semitism, and stereotypes of the Jewish American woman. It will argue that there are various clues in Kubrick’s films which produce Jewish moments; that is, where, through a com- plementary directing and acting strategy, in particular one of misdirection, the viewer is given the possibility of “reading Jewish,” albeit not with certainty, for Jewishness is “textually sub- merged.” Its focus is Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (), in par- ticular the character of Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, especially in light of Kubrick’s choice of casting for the role, and Winters’s subsequent performance of it. It will conclude that Holocaust and anti-Semitic stereotypes/reverse stereotypes haunt Kubrick’s version of Lolita as an emotional, yet sub-epidermis, presence. INTRODUCTION Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was rarely thought of as a Jewish director who made Jewish films (however that may be defined). Yet, born in , and growing up as the Holocaust was taking place in Europe, the awareness of the inescapability of his Central European Jewish heritage arguably had a sig- nificant emotional impact upon him. Although Kubrick said very little about the Holocaust, its presence is felt in his films, but it is approached obliquely, often via analogies and metaphors, sometimes by overt, albeit brief, moments which explore the very same issues raised by the Shoah. Frederic Raphael, who collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay for his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (), suggested, “S. K. proceeds by indirection ... [his] work could be viewed, as responding, in various ways, to the unspeakable (what lies beyond spoken explanation).”And John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska have pointed out, “Kubrick, who never realised his Holocaust film project, nonetheless had a SCSM, Bangor University. Email: [email protected]. Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (London: Orion, ), ; see also Geoffrey Cocks, “Indirected by Stanley Kubrick,” Post Script, , (), –. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.51.11, on 04 Oct 2021 at 17:21:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875814001844 Nathan Abrams post-Holocaust vision of the contemporary world.” This may well have been amplified by his third marriage, in , to Christiane Harlan, the niece of Veit Harlan, who had directed the notoriously anti-Semitic propaganda film, Jud Süss in . Kubrick had met Harlan in and wanted to make a film about him, and Kubrick therefore was surely sensitive to the impact on the Harlan family of Harlan’s decision to work so closely with the Nazi leadership. How this post-Holocaust sensibility operated in Kubrick’s films will be explored via a detailed case study of a key character in one of his films, namely Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, in his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (). She has been chosen because in casting and performance Winters’s real-life Jewishness and her performance of Haze’s onscreen persona provide a key prism through which to consider Kubrick’s own ethnicity and attitudes towards it, as well as his post-Holocaust sensibility, at a crucial stage in his career and in postwar Hollywood. It will be argued here that, if, as Daniel Anderson has suggested, “The language and the visible world of Lolita are so deeply conditioned by their post-Holocaust circumstances,” then they must have also influenced Kubrick. Consequently, the Holocaust haunts his version of Lolita as an emotional, yet submerged, presence, producing an intriguing representation of the Jewish American Mother. Scholars have already detected the novel’s underlying concerns with the Holocaust. Susan L. Mizruchi, for example, has elucidated the novel’s “holocaust subtext”; that is, “a consistent pattern of references to Nazi persec- ution and genocide in Europe.” Many of the metaphors and descriptions in the novel evoke the trains, camps, and other details of the Holocaust, both John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska, The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (London: Wallflower, ), . Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, ), . Reasons of length preclude a consideration of other characters and elements in the film, especially those that are also integral to a post-Holocaust sensibility. This may include a reckoning with the relationship between sexuality and perversity and “Jewishness,” so central to anti-Semitism as played out through Humbert in particular. The casting of Peter Sellers was yet another interesting and significant casting choice; Seller’s maternal Jewishness was also, I would argue, important to his selection. Furthermore, there are many possible ways and “coded clues” to reading his character/performance as Jewish. In both cases, then, there is certainly the implication that Humbert and Quilty might also be coded as Jewish, connecting their “inappropriate” sexuality to anti-Semitism. Douglas Anderson, “Nabokov’s Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts in ‘Lolita’,” Mosaic, , (), –, . Jerold J. Abrams, “The Logic of Lolita: Kubrick, Nabokov, and Poe,” in Abrams (ed.), The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, ), –; Susan L. Mizruchi, “Lolita in History,” American Literature, , (), –; Andrea Pitzer, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pegasus, ). Mizruchi, . Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.51.11, on 04 Oct 2021 at 17:21:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875814001844 A Jewish American Monster directly and subtextually. Nabokov refers to “the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed” or “the ashes of our predecessors.” In , the year of Lolita’s fictive birth, Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws and Anderson reads an imaginative equation between the Nazis’ obsession with race and therefore sexual reproduction and Humbert’s paedophilia, while Mizruchi posits that Humbert’s “case” parallels the ongoing trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg from to . The repetition of twins and twinning in the novel – the twin beds and the picture of twins in the motel, the twin girls in blue bathing suits who almost discover Lolita and Humbert Humbert (itself a twinned name), the four pairs of twins in Lolita’s class list (at least one of whom, “Cowan”, may be read as Jewish as it was common to alter the name “Cohen” to that) – evokes the notorious pseudoscientific medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Kubrick would later go on to make use of twins in The Shining (), which like the famous Diane Arbus photograph Identical Twins () that inspired him, also prompts audience reference to Mengele and Auschwitz. Mizruchi also observes Lolita’s “attention to American anti-Semitism.” Humbert is often mistaken for being Jewish. Before marrying him, Charlotte first wants to find out precisely how “foreign” Humbert is: “Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain.” She can tolerate a “Turk” as one of his ancestors, as long as he himself is truly Christian; however, “if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide.” Likewise, her friends, John and Jean Farlow, also have a vague suspicion he may be Jewish because of his dark looks and exotic name. So when John is about to make disparaging remarks about Jews in Humbert’s presence, “Of course, too many of the tradespeople here are Italians ... but on the other hand we are still spared,” she cuts him off. Humbert attempts to check in to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel but is initially refused entry because it is restricted, advertising itself as being “Near Churches,” a coded expression used in adverts to indicate its discriminatory, restrictive practices. Nabokov also makes continuous use in the novel of the number , as the workings of what Humbert regarded as “McFate” stalking him to his doom. The number also recurs in his Lolita screenplay. Cocks suggests that was “conscious and unconscious cultural shorthand Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Transworld, ; first published ), , . Anderson, –; Mizruchi, . See also Cocks, “Indirected,” –, on Kubrick’s use in The Shining of a painting by Paul Peel, After the Bath (), which depicts two naked little girls in front of a fireplace. Mizruchi, . Nabokov, . Ibid., –. Ibid., . Alfred Appel Jr. (ed.), The Annotated “Lolita” (London: Penguin, ), . See Cocks, The Wolf at the Door, for a full list. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.51.11, on 04 Oct 2021 at 17:21:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875814001844 Nathan Abrams for the Holocaust.” Consequently, Anderson argues that “the novel’s rich amalgamation of post-war America with pre-war Europe” evokes the “unbear- able memory of genocidal holocaust.” Yet Kubrick omitted many of these details, consistent with his practice of writing Jews out of his films, although he did reference them indirectly by various means. For example, he did use as the number of the room at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel in which Lolita and Humbert first have sex (and as a reference to the Holocaust throughout The Shining, which is set in the haunted Overlook Hotel).
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